Shining Sea Page 15

He reaches into his truck—and comes up with my backpack.

  “Hey, thanks.” I shoulder the pack. “How’d you get it?”

  “Ran into your friend.”

  “My friend? You mean Alyssa?”

  “Mm hmm. I mentioned that I was going to head over here today, check up on you. She told me she had your backpack.”

  “I’m so glad you got it. Thanks again.”

  “Yeah, well, you should thank me.”

  “Why, because you actually had to talk to her?”

  “That, and, you know. She wanted—Ah. Whatever.” Logan looks away.

  “Yeah, I bet she wanted whatever.” Picturing Alyssa with her waterfall of gleaming black hair and big blue eyes I say, “I hope you didn’t give it to her.”

  But I should know by now that teasing Logan is an unwinnable game.

  “Why?” He lifts his chin a little. “You want it?” His tone implies that I’ve not so cleverly worked my way into a corner he’s intimately familiar with.

  “Anyway,” I say lightly. “I need to go.”

  “You do, huh?” Logan smirks. Then he scowls a little. “Need to go see Summers? That is who I saw walking out on Smith Street, isn’t it? Walking from here?”

  With a pang of guilt I remember how I told Logan I’d call him this weekend.

  “Come on,” I say. “I can take a short beach walk.”

  He makes some comment about not wanting to twist my arm. We head down the stairs.

  Flinching, I step onto the sand, but my beach boycott really is over. Will my fear of the water continue to haunt me? I’m not sure, but soon Logan has me laughing like the gulls, and I’m not thinking about anything but his “close encounters,” as he puts it, with the teachers and administrators at school. His stories are hilarious. He has to be exaggerating.

  But then, as the sun slips down the sky and the air grows cooler, Logan abruptly changes the subject.

  “So what’s with you and Summers anyway?”

  Hearing him say Bo’s last name makes my stomach twist. “Nothing,” I say flatly.

  “Something.” The evening light sets off Logan’s startling eyes, and his skin seems even darker against the background of white sand dunes that stretch away behind him, reaching toward the bluffs. “Thought you were going to get in touch over the weekend.”

  “I was—I would have, but . . .” I tell him how I’d somehow spent hours at the museum, and for a split second, consider telling him how someone had tried to run me off the road. But remembering his reaction on Friday, when he thought I was in danger, I cut the story short.

  “Hours, huh? How come you didn’t ask me to keep you company?”

  “No reason, really.” I look down at my feet, white skin on white sand.

  “Okay. I get it.”

  “Hey. Don’t be like that. Sorry we didn’t connect, but things got a little crazy—”

  “Does Summers have anything to do with the ‘craziness’? As in, he’s crazy about you? ’Cause I gotta tell you, I don’t think that’s a good thing. Nick—” Logan kicks at the sand.

  “Believe me, Bo Summers is not crazy about me. What were you going to say? About Nick?”

  But Logan just shakes his head.

  Fine with me. I don’t want to talk to him about Bo, though I would like to know what Logan has against him. Does he really believe Bo had something to do with Nick’s death?

  The memory of Bo’s words whispers insidiously in my ear: “Sirens need the breath of living creatures.” No. No way. Anxiety gnaws at my stomach—which is empty.

  “How about I take you up on that offer? To go to dinner.”

  Blink; flash. Logan’s smile against the darkening sky is a beam from the lighthouse.

  “Brilliant idea, Airyhead.” He slings his arm over my shoulders and turns me around. He’s handsome in the twilight, mysterious, even. Sarah said that Nick’s girlfriend had been in love with Logan. I’m not the only one withholding part of a story.

  Luckily, Dad still isn’t home, which means he hasn’t read my note yet, which means I’m not grounded. Yet. So I can go to dinner with Logan. Logic.

  “Wait a sec.” Grabbing my backpack from where I left it sitting on the pebbles, I trot down to the keeper’s cottage and set it inside the door. Dashing into the bathroom I splash water on my face and hurriedly smooth on some lip balm. Then I write Dad yet another note. On the way out the door I spot a brown paper package from Mom. I rip it open—Yes, sweaters. A heavy teal-green wool turtleneck, and a lighter, loosely knit pale-pink mohair cloud of a thing with a ballerina neckline. Yanking off my hoodie, I tug the sea-green sweater over my head. And remember the letter, up in my room.

  For a second, I wonder why I haven’t opened it. But really, I know why. Know the letter will be like the others, like journal pages. Like a ship’s log, but more personal: a daily account of what she sees, what she thinks. She’s sent a couple of letters since I left, and now I imagine them bound in a book, a slim volume: Observations of an Artist’s Journey. It would be a beautiful book. Powerful, like her paintings. But not nearly as warm as the sweaters. Mom, I miss you.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, I find Logan leaning against his truck. He says, “Want to try the new restaurant in town?”

  “Sure, what kind of food is it?” But I don’t really care what kind of food it is. I’m still thinking of my mom, and of Lilah now.

  Then Logan jostles me, says, “Raw, baby.” And I feel my mood lighten.

  “Do I even want to know what that means?”

  “I don’t know, Rush, do you?”

  SUSHI

  The drive to town is a blink—probably because we’ve been talking about music. Here by the harbor, the speed limit drops, and Logan slows, looking past me to the long wooden docks stretching away into the water, their ends floating far out—where the sea and sky merge to become a single dark entity.

  “Beat matching, scratching—” With what appears to be some effort, he brings his attention back to the conversation. He’s been ranting without heat about DJing. “Nothing but smoke and mirrors. It’s the track selection. That’s what draws the crowds.”

  “The crowds. As in, the girls at school.”

  He laughs.

  I laugh. “Logan, the radio station at school doesn’t even have—”

  “Cutting, spinbacks—don’t need it. A good playlist, some nice fades—”

  “That station consists of one CD player and a couple of iPods! You can’t even do the things you’re talking about there.”

  “Well, not technically. No.”

  “Not technically? You mean, not at all.”

  “Like I said. It’s the songs—” But I’m laughing again and he breaks off. “What is it? What’s so funny?” He’s grinning, though. He got me riled, and he knows it. I know it.

  He parks the truck, and then we’re heading across the road toward the restaurant, both of us laughing now about his “mad DJ skills”—

  Suddenly I stop in the middle of the street, staring at the name etched in ornate calligraphy on a piece of driftwood above the door.

  SIGN OF THE MERMAID

  “What,” he says. “Did you drop your lipstick?” But he looks both ways down the street, and takes my hand.

  “Were you a Boy Scout, or something?” I joke back. But I grip his fingers.

  Dinner hour, Sunday night, yet the restaurant is empty except for a small group over in the far corner. As we wait to be seated I read a notice near the hostess station. Sign of the Mermaid is closing next week for the season. We sit down at a table for two.

  “Does this whole place just shut down at the end of September, or what?”

  “Yeah, you moved to a real ghost town.” Logan cups his hands around his mouth and blows. “That’s the sound of the wicked Maine winter wind, in case you didn’t get it. But don’t worry, there’ll still be some places open. Two, I think. You might want to reserve me now for Saturday nights, though; I get double-booked on winter weekends.”r />
  “Let me grab my calendar.” I reach for the menu.

  The hostess has seated us close to the group at the corner table, probably to make the waitress’s job easier. I wish she hadn’t. There are three people at the round table, two who are facing each other across the table, and one more person who’s staring straight ahead—at me. More like, glaring. I drop my gaze to the menu.

  “So what are you going to have? How about some uni?” Logan wiggles his fingers at me.

  “Give me another minute,” I say, reading the word “uramaki” over and over.

  Peeking over the top of the menu, I watch a girl about my age whose profile is toward me skillfully lift a piece of sashimi with her chopsticks and place it in her mouth. She has perfect skin and chin-length pale-blond hair cut at a sharp angle. Tilting her head back, she lets the piece of fish slide down her white throat without chewing. Then she smirks at something the boy across the table says. He’s cute, with blue eyes, freckles, and blond hair streaked by the sun. His eyes flash with light as he laughs—and I go still. He’s a younger version of Bo. Maybe with a better sense of humor, I decide, continuing to watch him.

  Not one to be politically correct, Logan reads the menu to me in a poorly executed Japanese accent. Intent on the group at the round table, I have no idea what I order. When the food comes, Logan sorts it out. To his credit he more than holds up his end of the conversation. Nodding and smiling, I silently promise to make it up to him. He seems fairly happy.

  But the guy at the corner table—the one who hasn’t taken his eyes off me—is obviously unhappy. His fierce scowl says as much. His hair is longer than the younger boy’s, wilder and darker, but with the same bleached-out streaks that make him look as if he spends his life outdoors. He’s ruggedly handsome. Now the girl says his name.

  Jordan. Bo’s older brother.

  Carefully mixing wasabi and soy sauce in a tiny bowl decorated with a painted dragonfly, I let my hair hang forward and peer through it at the older boy. He’s still staring straight at me. His dark-blue eyes, close in color to the night sky, are filled with outrage.

  I decide not to look up again—to spend the rest of the meal chatting with Logan and appreciating the sushi. But as snatches of conversation drift over from the neighboring table, I find myself listening to the words as if they’re background music, until—

  Jordan’s voice—it just . . . grabs me. That’s the only way to describe what’s happening. His voice sounds like Bo’s, but deeper, grittier. If it were a color, it would be the very blackest blue, the color of the sky at that tipping time, when dusk bleeds into something darker. His voice becomes the center of my attention now. Even weirder: I feel like he knows that it has.

  He starts talking about oceanography and atmospheric sciences, and my palms turn as clammy as one of the small rectangles of sashimi. The exact meaning of what he’s saying is beyond my understanding, but the words themselves—sound like poetry.

  “Stellar interiors . . . subharmonic instability . . . inertia latitude . . .” His voice is almost hypnotic, and again, I think of Bo, of the way his words spiraled into strange, seductive sounds, the way they became more than words, the way they became music. I remember, too, how I’d been unable to control my thoughts, my—self. But now, listening to Jordan . . . that doesn’t bother me. In retrospect, the afternoon with Bo seems . . . fine. I relax about it now . . .

  “Attraction zones, empty . . . must propagate . . .”

  And a kind of dreaminess settles over me. A dreamy . . . desire, almost, for . . . for . . .

  “Why are you joining a punk band? You want a guy with a safety pin through his—”

  My attention jerks back to Logan. “Huh? Wait. What did you just say?”

  “Kidding. Where were you just now?”

  “Sorry, I—I would like to be in a band. But not a punk band.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” he says. “You and Mary . . . I can see it.”

  But suddenly it’s me who’s seeing—something in Logan’s face. His familiarity—he reminds me of someone. But then Logan’s expression changes—to one of concern, I think—and all I see is, well, him.

  “Want to get going?” he asks.

  I say yes—but then it hits me.

  San Francisco. The docks. The boy in the baseball cap—Logan looks like him.

  But then Logan drinks the last of the tea, scrunching up his nose and commenting on the flavor—“This tastes like perfume, don’t you think, Rush? The way perfume smells?”—and I realize that I’m wrong—of course I’m wrong. He doesn’t look like that guy at all. I never even really saw that boy’s face.

  I tell Logan the tea’s jasmine. We stand up—

  At the same moment the group from the corner table passes by, heading toward the door.

  Jordan shoots me a savage smile, a keen-edged curve that has nothing to do with being friendly, and a vivid memory of Bo holding me in his arms hits me so hard, I bring a hand to my chest. Despite the racing nighttime waves in Jordan’s eyes, I almost blurt, Where’s your brother?

  Logan angles a sharp look down at me. “You okay?”

  “Yes.” But I’m not okay. I feel dizzy. Ill.

  The waitress, who we haven’t seen since she delivered our food, finally makes her way over with the bill, and Logan gets out his wallet. My intention had been to go Dutch, but it feels like I’m recovering from some kind of bizarre occurrence, and instead of offering to split the check, I just stand there. I can’t take my eyes off Jordan, and now I watch as he holds the door for his brother and sister. After he lets it fall closed behind him, an eerie stillness remains.

  I don’t think they even paid.

  “Ready?” Logan asks quietly.

  When we get to the truck, he opens the door for me. The air inside is cold. The seat is colder. He slides in and starts the engine. I turn the heater on full blast. The sound of the fan fills the cab. Logan turns, reaching across the space between us, his fingers brushing my neck as he gives the teal turtleneck a little tug.

  “You’re kind of early, but you’ve got the right idea. The entire state of Maine freezes solid in the winter.” He keeps his hold on the sweater, and I wait for the joke, maybe an offer to keep me warm. But he only looks at me, his clear gray eyes full of questions.

  The words that had floated over from the corner table during dinner move through my mind like shifting sand. “They collapse into each other, in an attraction orbit.”

  “Thanks for dinner,” I stammer. And this time, it’s me who initiates the hug.

  Logan’s warm, the muscles of his back are hard, his chest solid, comforting.

  The feel of him is almost enough to make me forget about Jordan Summers, about the way he’d stared at me all though dinner.

  But not quite.

  Still, it isn’t until Logan’s breath stirs my hair that I realize I’ve held on to him just a little too long, and a little too tight, for the hug to be only a thank-you.

  NIGHT

  The swinging beam of the lighthouse flashes across my face—

  Or, it’s the bright light of the moon—

  It’s white, white, white—

  “No!” I wake scuttling backward on the bed, screaming. Music’s pounding in my head—

  The air is cold against my chest—my pajama top. It’s open in the front. Something white spins by my window—

  I scream again, louder this time, because I know—

  Someone was here, in my room.

  The white, the wings—

  “I only want to look. Only want to listen.”

  It wasn’t a dream. Not this time. Someone was here. Someone spoke.

  I wrap my arms around myself. My head feels heavy—like I’ve been drinking Dad’s beers, or—I don’t know. My hands too, as I lift them to button my top, are so very heavy.

  My head is muzzy, but I know—I know—someone was here. Somebody said those words to me, unbuttoned my top—

  What would have happened if I ha
dn’t woken up?

  Trembling, I reach down to yank the blankets from the floor and then wrap them around me as I climb out of bed and walk to the east-facing window.

  But all I see is a spread of stars.

  I glance at the clock. Three a.m. I run a hand over my face.

  After Logan dropped me off, I retrieved my backpack from the keeper’s cottage. Dad still hadn’t been home. Crumpling the last note I’d left, I remembered: Dad was making dinner for Logan’s folks tonight.

  I was glad that Logan went home to a full house. I was just as glad mine was empty.

  But I wish someone were here with me now. I consider heading down to the cottage. But the talk with Dad is already going to be epic. Adding the middle-of-the-night factor, not a good idea.

  Wide awake now, I’m afraid to go back to sleep. Afraid white wings will whirl by my window—and I’ll miss them.

  These final thoughts are equally distressing—I don’t understand what’s happening to me. But I can’t just sit here. I feel like I’m going to climb out of my skin. Scuffing into my slippers, I grab the teal turtleneck. I need to clear my head.

  The bedroom door creaks as I open it, the sound echoing off the bricks of the cold tower. Padding up the stairs to the watch room, I listen for a moment to the wind as it whistles through brass porthole-shaped vents, fighting a disquieting urge to go out on the deck. It’s bitter out there for sure. Instead, I climb the ladder to the glassed-in lantern room that houses the Fresnel lens.

  A lighthouse using a Fresnel lens is a rarity. This lens is of the first order, which basically means it’s huge, ten feet across. Sitting on the floor of the lantern room, I hug my knees tight to my chest. The prisms of the lens refract the light of the lamp, the sharp glass edges creating brilliant rainbows, all the colors missing from the nighttime world outside.

  Logan was uncharacteristically quiet on the drive back to the lighthouse. At first, I thought maybe it was me, or the hug that had been something more than a hug. But then I figured it out: seeing the Summers had shaken him. And that worries me. I know depression, know how the endless loop of thinking can go around in your head like a noose circling a neck.